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Get your swords and spellbooks ready, Sacred: Gold Edition is here and ready to order! Adventure through a massive land in the biggest RPG to come to Linux. Join other players online in collaborative adventuring as you seek to rescue the land of Ancaria from its evil nemesis!

There’s an older review of the PC version of the game here at GameZone.

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7 Responses to “Sacred: Gold Edition Available”

MULTI PLAYER!!! HELL YEAH!
For some reason I thought I read this was single player only. I will get 2 of my Linux using friends to buy this once they see my copy, which I pre-ordered like 6 mo ago, glad to see it finishing!

Why would anyone to expect commercial success for a game that costs $40.00 to run in Linux but the Windows version can be downloaded for $20.00?

I could care less if they are giving away a Windows version. I only use Linux for gaming on my PC & wine won’t be an option I’ll use. LGP doesn’t cater to the dual-boot crowd. They target Linux only gamers.

Likewise, Linux is my gaming platform. What is available elsewhere is a non sequitur for me and has been for years now. I buy the games I feel interested in, like RPGs such as Scared. I avoid games that are not a style I care for such as most of the Deathmatch focused FPSs. And then there are other things that can prevent me from buying a game. I have bought several games from LGP and have liked them. Price is not what will prevent me from buying this game.

That’s great that a few people are willing to shell out double the Windows price for a game so you can support Linux but, a few die hard fans will not make a financial success out of a game. This issue is one of the prime reasons Linux doesn’t take hold with the mass market. Less than 4% of the market is Linux. Serious commercial game designers aren’t going to waste resources for such a low percentage. So what we have is a ‘what came first, chicken or the egg” scenario.

To get more gamers using Linux there need to be more serious games and those games need to be priced competitively with Windows versions. As long as there is such a shortage of serious Linux games there will not be any meaningful migration to Linux as a gamers’ O.S. Without that migration, there won’t be many commercial games for Linux.

Those of you that “don’t care about prices for Linux games” are not doing the platform any favors.

You are looking at it as a light switch. It’s on or it’s off. Right now there are games. That’s better than when I started using linux. Back then, people duel booting weren’t helping. They were prolonging the problem. Then the poeple using emulators weren’t helping. They were inflating the numbers for other markets. Then there were FPSs and nothing else. Then the people buying FPSs when they didn’t even like them weren’t helping the market by marking it look like all linux users love FPSs and nothing less. Then came the RTSs. etc. etc. etc.

Now I’m hurting things because, although I am buying what I genuinely like and boycotting things I don’t, I buy at a higher price than they are on windows. As I said, I only play games on linux. The price of game one windows is not an economic factor to me. There are too many other issues with windows for me to consider it an option.

If a game cost more than it’s worth to you, then don’t buy it. But don’t pretend that the cost on windows has to be that much of a factor. People aren’t switching to linux for the games. But people are holding off switching because of the games. Linux is a niche market. The people in that market have to know they will pay more and the suppliers have to know they aren’t going to have block buster sales. At least now the options are better than they were when I finally dropped windows.

What you might want to consider, if you actually want games on linux but at a lower price, are the Indie games. Eschalon is an RPG that I found to be very good. Lugaru is a good 3rd person melee fighting game. Both of those titles are available for linux and have sequels coming out soon. It appears that Elecorn’s unique 3rd shooter called Caster is going to be ported to linux. Also Introversion has put several titles out on linux and it appears they will put out more. These smaller game companies have been making interesting games and have found they can benefit from the hype of not being tied to the monopoly OS and that they sometime benefit from being a big fish in a smaller pond.

Maybe it’s time for linux gamers to be more picky about price. I’m not sure we are there yet, but the economy doesn’t help either. I will admit that I am slower about deciding to buy the more expensive LGP titles than I am about buying smaller, cheaper game like Kamyran’s Eye 2 ($7US) but certain titles are things I’d like and I will pay what they are worth to me. That includes space simulations like X3 & RPGs like Sacred. Sacred is cheaper for windows because it’s old on windows. But it’s new to me and it’s the type of game I want on linux.

In the end, I have to admit I will not be buying Sacred or X3 due to a decision LGP made recently that means more to me than playing games. However, if they ever go back on that decision and sell versions of those games without the problem, then I would most like buy both. Fortunately, there are several other Indie companies discovering linux who do not seem interested in repeating LGP’s mistake. Coincidently, their titles tend to cost less.